Facebook

There perhaps are two ways to think about the Internet — before and after Facebook. By now you know the story. (Hell, they made a movie about it.) Some Harvard students create a site to rank girls. It expands into a larger network of collegians, and Facebook in its early form required a college .edu email address to join. In 2006, it opened up to anyone age 13 and older.

Fast forward a few years and many billions of dollars, and Facebook is now a publicly traded company. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one of the youngest billionaires in the world, along with co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who's younger by all of eight days). Facebook is how we keep in touch. How we stalk our former high school classmates. How potential employers check out potential hires. How news organizations and public entities get the word out. How we play games. How we share photos and video. How we forget how to have real relationships with actual people. It's how we log into other websites, using our Facebook credentials.

Like it or not, Facebook, in the span of a decade, became one of the most important online properties we've ever know.

Will it continue to be so in another 10 years? We'll have to see. But for now, there's no escaping it.

Screenshots

All Facebook

The New York Times is reporting that the original development team at Facebook responsible for the Facebook Home Android skin has been disbanded, but the company has since sent out a statement claiming that development of Home will continue.
The NYT, citing unnamed sources, claims that the...

After launching exclusively in the US earlier this month, Facebook's Snapchat competitor service Slingshot is now available globally.
The ephemeral photo sharing service handles messages slightly differently to Snapchat. To view an incoming image, you have to send an image back to the sender,...

Facebook is no stranger to social media, so it should be of little surprise to see them taking on Snapchat in their latest release dubbed Slingshot. Slingshot is a photo sharing app, but instead of just expiring photos, users send one photo to a contact, but the recipient cannot see the image...

Facebook has rolled out another update for its Messenger app on Android. The social network has implemented instant video sharing and the ability to send 'big likes' to friends in the conversation, just in case you happen to really like something. This latest update brings the app up to version 6...

Even without an active data connection, Facebook's latest version 10.0 update for Android still allows you to be social. Now, with the free update on Google's Play store, users can like posts, photos, and pages even without an Internet connection, which is good if you're bored on a long flight or...

There's an update coming down the pike for the official Facebook app that will enable users to automatically tag the music and TV that they're listening/watching in their status updates. As demoed in the video above, the system works by tapping a button when creating a new status — not unlike...

After a spurned attempt to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion last year, Facebook is gearing up to launch its own ephemeral messaging app, internally codenamed "Slingshot". The app, which is said to have a "simple and speedy user interface" (not unlike Snapchat) is designed to take on Snapchat with...

Adrian Wong, lead electrical engineer on Glass, has left Google to join Facebook. What's a guy like Wong doing at Facebook with his skill set? He's joining the Oculus team to work on the virtual reality.
The move is confirmed by an updated bio on his LinkedIn page. His last day at Google came...

The Facebook app for Android has received an update that enables offline posting. It's pretty simple in concept and design: create a post, be it text, an image, a video, or a combination of all of those, submit it, and once your phone is back into someplace where you have signal or you switch off...

Facebook made some impressive strides in privacy at their annual conference today, announcing a new feature that would let users log into connected apps without giving any personal data. There will also be the option for users to tick off which Facebook permissions to allow an app on the...

Today at Facebook's F8 developer conference, the social networking giant unveiled a new initiative to make it easier to share data between mobile apps and the web: App Links. The open source service is meant to make it easy for developers to expose and integrate deep links into their app and...

Facebook Messenger has been updated with video sharing, faster photo sharing, and sticker shortcuts. The update to version 5.0 doesn't bring any of the visual changes you might expect with such a version bump (Messenger hit 4.0 just a month ago), but it does bring the app in-line with is iOS...

Facebook, the world's most popular social network, is reportedly looking to get into the lucrative mobile ad game, perhaps as early as their F8 developers conference set to kick off in San Francisco on April 30, 2014. Facebook has been serving their own ads for a long time now, but this would be...

Facebook has announced an interesting new feature called Nearby Friends which does pretty much exactly what you think it does. User can optionally turn on broad proximity notifications, so you and your friends can get a notice when your friends are nearby. You can set specific friends and friends...

'Like if you agree, share if you disagree!'
Get ready to see fewer spam posts in your Facebook News Feed. Taking to its official blog, Facebook is letting everyone know that it's taking a harder stance on not showing posts that people deem "spammy." The new effort comes down to blocking out...

Low-end devices with constrained resources can keep using in-app messaging
Facebook is working on transitioning users somewhat forcefully to using their dedicated Messenger app. Warning messages have been sent out to some European users that in about two weeks time, they wouldn’t be able to use...

A new Facebook Messenger update is rolling through the Google Play Store right now. Listed a v4.0, it features quite few changes over the last update, though some were previously available on the beta. If you weren't part of that, the update brings along groups, forwarding, conversation shortcuts...

Group administrators get new control over pinned and reported posts as well
Folks on the stable release of Facebook are picking up some much-needed app improvements that have been in play on the Facebook beta channel for some time. The updates this time around mostly have to do with photos and...

Gradual change will force users to sign up for a proper Yahoo ID to use services like Flickr or fantasy sports
At a time when many are calling for a simple, secure and single sign-in across the web, Yahoo is taking a step back. Starting soon, to access any of Yahoo's Internet services — which...

And yet another Monday liveblog from Mobile World Congress where Faceook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to give a keynote address on, well, whatever he wants. Zuckerberg's actually a fairly compelling speaker, and this should be a good one.
What to expect? Probably not any new Facebook phone...

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